Callout to DMD hackers

[Asman01]

On Saturday, 8 March 2014 at 13:25:32 UTC, Andrej Mitrovic wrote:
> Recently Vladimir Panteleev has ported the DMD Source Guide 
> from the old wiki to the new one[1], and updated it with 
> up-to-date information. I've added a "DMD Hacking Tips & 
> Tricks" section[2], which should help people new to the 
> codebase to start hacking on DMD-FE. I've only added a few tips 
> that I know of.
>
> If you regularly hack on DMD and know some good tips for new 
> DMD developers, please either post those tips in this thread 
> and we'll add them to the wiki, or you can directly add them to 
> the wiki. Everybody benefits from sharing knowledge about 
> compiler internals. For example, GCC has pretty extensive 
> documentation about its internals[3].
>
> [1] : http://wiki.dlang.org/DMD_Source_Guide
> [2] : 
> http://wiki.dlang.org/DMD_Source_Guide#DMD_Hacking_Tips_.26_Tricks
> [3] : http://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gccint/

Awesome! Thanks for the information. This part of article[1] was 
funny to add Walter as one of the people seem to have understood 
the DMD IR. Was not DMD IR implemented by Walter? also, me too. I 
don't got how DMD IR actually works or what is like.

I don't understand this part "converted to UTF-8 when necessary" 
in [2].
What does it mean? I don't know much about UTF-8, just basics, 
unlike as should do, but shouldn't convert everything to UTF-8 
and just handle the source code as UTF-8?


[1]: I've been looking at trying to hook the DMD frontend up to 
LLVM (www.llvm.org), but I've been having some trouble. The LLVM 
IR (Intermediate Representation) is very well documented, but I'm 
having a rough time figuring out how DMD holds its IR. Since at 
least three people (David, Ben, and Walter) seem to have 
understand, I thought I'd ask for guidance.